Sue De Beer has described The Quickening (2006) as "a psychedelic
historical film, set in puritan America in 1740." 1.
It's pretty unusual in the context of her video-works that deal almost
categorically with today's youth, coming of age, and rock-n-roll.
Without much of a stretch, I suppose, the quizzical making out with
myself (1997) could be considered a preamble to The Quickening. Both
works emphasize bonds between creativity and sexuality. But nearly a
decade later, de Beer has developed a fuller role for the artist, who is
now a character with some depth, and she has created a sensual
video-installation to engage bodies and minds. Readers of The Scarlet
Letter (1850) and The House of Seven Gables (1851) will recognize the
oppressive society about which Nathaniel Hawthorne spilled so much ink.
Clandestine meetings, keys passed between lovers, and the clash of
religious morality and sexual desire, all find a place in The
Quickening.2
For anyone who forgets that Hawthorne's writing about the puritans was
once thought "naughty" and "racy," de Beer's work is an evocative
reminder of how sexy puritans can be3.

In spite of the fact that de Beer intended The Quickening as a kind of
period film, her disdain for the idea of the historical real should be
immediately obvious. If it isn't, then, to make this point she weaves
Joris-Karl Huysmans's reflections on the demise of naturalism -- in À
Rebours (1884) -- into the monologue of the central
artist-character4.
Typical of her sense of humor, she realizes a frenzied and unreal style.
Her erratic cut-up method results in a trippy, fin-de-siècle decadent,
scary movie.

The Quickening includes tell-tale signs of slasher films, like close
views of a woman being stalked, maddening shots that hide the killer's
identity (we see and hear the blade penetrating and being pulled from
her body), and sequences that seem to make the camera's view into the
killer's viewpoint. The way that violence hijacks eroticism and turns
sexual pleasure into fear and shock will also be familiar to fans of the
slasher genre5.
All of this is echoed in simple but effective audio -- howling and
thudding made by Andy Comer, wind sounds made by passing buses and
traffic -- which de Beer layered into the final cut.

The impression of spectral events that is given relates to
supernatural visitations, like those in 'spoken' histories of the 1700s
that sounded psychedelic to [her]: a cat appears at your feet as you
sleep, and the cat becomes a man, and then you are in the forest and you
have to sign a black book.

Indistinction between fantasy and reality further complicates matters,
and makes the heroine's night-journey as terrifying as it is trippy.
It's difficult to confirm or fix her position or time tracks when de
Beer layers phantasmatic trips upon dreams and trances6.
If there is storyline, it gets lost in quotation, amateurish cuts, and
illegible anagrams. It seems as though there is some kind of
film-within-a-film in which the heroine is stalked and raped by a
character who behaves like the psycho killer of slasher films, the crazy
dangerous guy who hunts down sexually active young women. After being
viciously stabbed, the heroine, who is marked by her sexuality, is hung
like the witches in Salem, and unceremoniously abandoned in a
cave7.
Only later will she be found by a woman wearing a scarlet dress, who
places a mirror in the dead woman's hands. If this is not confusing
enough, the artist's dream sequence shows a maiden, waltzing with a wolf
and bull, and sweeping a forest floor. The weirdness of showing her
idyllic place in nature is matched by the sentimentality of Comer's John
Denver cover song in the background.

These bizarre events seem to take place in the mind of the
artist-character. His visions allow us to understand the creativity of
magic, sexuality, and art as social resistance. They also help us make
sense of the historical theme of the work. As Max Weber explained in his
laborious way, protestantism created a stronghold where utilitarian
attitudes and occupational practices of capitalism
flourished.8

Not surprisingly, then, de Beer's artist is shown in decadent
surroundings so we understand that he is something of an outsider.
Puritan asceticism and policing of desire was, much like that society's
attempt to stamp out magic, fully consonant with the work ethic,
frugality, and capitalist spirit which animated the lives of protestant
puritans. These facts notwithstanding, sexual repression is not merely
the historical product of capitalism and born of the way that
utilitarian labor can be thought of as opposed to useless expenditure.
One of Michel Foucault's great innovations was to have seen that sexual
repression relates to the ways our bodies and bare life have become
increasingly politicized and drawn into the center of the
juridical-political order9
This shift, which he identifies with the era of biopower, also involves
the proliferation of discourses about sex and of institutions that have
made a science out of sex and pleasure.

What happens in The Quickening is therefore pretty striking. In the
work, we see pleasure and science turning into art and magic. This is
not to say that there is a simple reversal of the biopolitical
situation. But I am saying, and I think de Beer is also suggesting, that
the exercise of power on and through the body is perhaps the most
pressing concern that we face today. In this vein it makes perfect sense
for The Quickening to include Jonathan Edwards's restrictive warning
about the foot that slips from its firm moral grounding, and Huysmans's
remarks about gesturing hysterics, who were thought to be possessed by
the devil10.
Both historical texts point to the society's need for control over the
body's movements, gesticulations, and desire.

The artist-character is someone who wants to get beyond the rigid
conditioning of the body and mind. For de Beer, he becomes "a kind of
psychedelic inventor - like Timothy Leary or William S. Burroughs/Brion
Gysin - who takes controlled substances to experience the breakdown of
the conscious mind." The entire work, then, seems to have emerged from a
trance that was induced in the artist by a dreamachine. This simple
device is made out of a light cylinder, which is attached to a record
player's turntable spinning at 78 RPM. In 1959, Gysin and Ian
Sommerville conceived it as a multidimensional kaleidoscope, and they
subsequently used it in psychedelic experiments with Burroughs. They
believed that the flickering light patterns made by the machine could
stimulate the cortex, reproduce the Alpha frequency of brainwaves, and
induce hallucination. The dreamachine was therefore considered a means
of freeing the mind of conscious -- and social -- control. Availing
herself of these insights, de Beer also tries to interrupt the
programming of human subjects through processes and patterns that are
intrinsic in the human body11
So her video includes hallucinatory, disorienting, and beautiful
flickering, and she exploits vivid color lighting to affect people
inside the installation12.

Reflecting on the dreamachine, Burroughs told an interviewer that he
made a point of keeping up with science, particularly, current research
about drugs, psychiatry, and brain stimulation12.
This science, he felt, could tell us a lot about how to resist being
controlled. Although de Beer's dreamachine does not herald political
revolution in today's puritanical culture, she and Burroughs would
probably agree that cultural revolutionaries should be open to such
means of changing the body and mind.

1 All comments by Sue de Beer in this text
have been taken from correspondence with the author during October,
2006.

2 De Beer is, in fact, a long-time reader of Hawthorne's work. She grew
up in Salem, Massachusetts, where Hawthorne did a lot of his writing.

4 Huysmans's novel À Rebours is frequently associated with the turn
from Naturalism to Symbolism, and as he wrote in the preface twenty
years after the fact, "Naturalism was getting more and more out of
breath by dint of turning the mill for ever in the same round."
Joris-Karl Huysmans. Against the Grain (New York: Dover Publications,
1969), p. xxxv.

5 Cinematically lush and yet a little raw, de Beer's work has a
bluntness that is by now her signature. It suggests the relevance of Tom
Savini and the how-to horror books that de Beer likes so much.

6 De Beer continually exploits anachronism, too. One heroine wears a
somber but short puritan dress and heavy makeup. Another heroine appears
as a sexy maiden, clad in a scarlet dress with a plunging neckline. Both
women don high heels and stockings, even though they wear the
conventional white head-dress of puritans.

7 Nathaniel Hawthorne's great grand-father was a judge who presided
over the Salem witch trials in 1692, and Hawthorne spoke about his guilt
concerning that legacy.

8 Max Weber. Trans. Talcott Parsons. The Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Dover Publications, 2003). This text was
originally published in German.

9 Michel Foucault. Trans. Robert Hurley. The History of Sexuality
Volume I (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), p. 5. This book was written
in French in 1975 and published in English in 1978.

10 In a voiceover, de Beer uses excerpts from "Sinners in the Hands of
an Angry God" (1741) by theologian Jonathan Edwards. The title of The
Quickening also interrelates the body's movements with time, and refers
to "the moment when a child grows in the womb, and the moment before
death - the hastening of death, The Quickening."

11 The dreamachine relates to Foucault's notion of technologies of the
self.

12 She captures patterns just like the ones that are shown in
Antony Balch's experimental film The Cut-Ups (1966), which is a work
that includes Burroughs, Gysin, and Sommerville. The pattern corresponds
to swirling mosaics and diamond-patterns of psychedelic color lighting
in de Beer's video and installation. Jens Höhne, a Berlin-based lighting
designer who builds many of his own lights, helped de Beer create
effects of the 1960s and 1970s with color gell filters and special
lenses.